Easier said than done. Do defaults and reminders affect public workers’ knowledge of guidelines?

Abstract Building on recent developments in behavioral public administration theory and methods, we conduct an online randomized controlled trial to study how defaults and reminders affect the performance of 5,303 public healthcare professionals on a test about the appropriate use of gloves. When incorrect answers are pre-populated, thus setting incorrect defaults, participants are more likely to err notwithstanding the fact that they are asked to double check the pre-populated answers. Conversely, when correct answers are pre-populated, thus setting correct defaults, subjects are less likely to err and they tend to perform better than their peers taking the non-pre-populated version of the same questions. Participants receiving either a visual or a textual reminder about the appropriate use of gloves right before the test outperform their counterparts in a control group. We also find that visual aids are more effective than textual reminders.